


entente

by estora



Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Asexual Daud, Corvo the Royal Kleptomaniac, Dishonored 2, Gen, High Chaos Emily Kaldwin, Low Chaos (Dishonored), Low Chaos Corvo Attano, Low Chaos Daud
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-22
Updated: 2017-12-30
Packaged: 2018-09-11 03:34:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 12,532
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8952280
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/estora/pseuds/estora
Summary: Daud doesn’t believe in luck or coincidences. Nor is he particularly devout – the Seven Strictures are uncomfortably cultish – and likewise is not especially heretical, despite the Outsider’s mark on the back of his left hand. But if there is one thing he believes in, it’s the hand of the enigmatic little shit who rules the place beyond the physical world.Daud, Corvo, Emily. An understanding is tentatively reached. The coup, redux.





	1. I

**Author's Note:**

> [Now translated into Russian](https://ficbook.net/readfic/5451095) by Inky Che! Thank you so much!!

_“Run, Emily! I’ll hold them off!”_

** **

One week into the glorious reign of Empress Delilah Kaldwin, First of her Name, somehow manages to beat out six months’ worth of rat-plague damage to Dunwall. Daud isn’t sure whether to be impressed or horrified.

The streets are littered with the corpses of guards loyal to Emily Kaldwin, and no one has bothered to collect them. They are strewn carelessly across hedges, staircases, in front of abandoned, crumbling mansions that barely weeks ago were proud, well-tended estates. The Duke’s men peeing on barely-decomposing bodies, throwing bottles of alcohol around like the thugs they are.

And the _witches_. Prowling through the streets like weeds choking the life out of a herb garden, slipping through every crack in the soil to infect it with its own seed. The latest rat plague to infect the city.

This, Daud thinks, was why he left the godforsaken place to begin with. 

He’s too late, obviously, to get the message to the Empress about the coup d’état. The only reason he knows she isn’t being held captive by the new regime is because of the loudspeaker announcements going off every five minutes – it’s a crime to aid and hide a fugitive, Emily Kaldwin is wanted for treason, etcetera etcetera ad nauseum. Which means she could be anywhere. Hiding in a rundown apartment somewhere. Halfway to Karnaca. Crushed under the wheel of a carriage, face so unrecognisable that no one will ever be able to identify her as Emily Kaldwin and therefore will never be able to collect the reward money.

Corvo Attano, on the other hand, is much easier to find, since the latest series of five-minutely announcements helpfully inform Daud that he’s being held in the palace itself.

For someone who broke into the palace before, Daud would have thought Attano would have the sense to close the place off from potential threats like himself, or like Daud, and seal the gaps in security. The plumbing that’s just a touch too close to the windows, or the wooden scaffolding that allow him to slip directly down through the heart of the palace down to where Attano is being held captive.

The man is a mess. He’s been beaten, pummelled, his chest lashed with barbed attacks that remind Daud of Brigmore as though it was yesterday. He’s chained and held down like a dog; not as emaciated or mentally unhinged as he reported was after his six months in Coldridge.

Daud wants Emily, not the man who would probably kill him on sight. But this will do for now.

He leans beside Attano’s figure. “Hey. Attano. Wake up.”

Attano’s bloodshot eyes creak open. “No,” he moans. “Not you. Anyone but you.”

“That’s no way to greet your rescuer,” Daud says.

Attano releases an alarming noise – a sort of huffing, like he’s gasping for air. It takes Daud too long to realise it’s laughter. “Like I would hallucinate _you_ ,” he rasps, “to rescue me.”

Daud whacks him across the face. Attano yelps, his head jolting sideways as the sound of leather striking flesh snaps through the room.

“Good thing I’m not a hallucination,” Daud says.

“You – you’re –” Attano says, blinking hard at Daud.

“Here. Yes. What I can’t work out is why you’re –”

The answer presents itself. The back of Attano’s left hand looks as though the Duke's men had stomped it repeatedly, the bones shattered and the skin swollen with grime and infection, but no amount of trauma like that is enough to erase the mark of the Outsider. It looks wrong, as though something is missing – something fundamental to Corvo Attano, Lord Protector, the Masked Felon of Dunwall. Like part of his soul has been ripped away from the flesh.

Attano follows his gaze. “Oh,” he says. “Courtesy of… our new Empress.” His mouth twists into a sneering smile that is more a grimace.

“How the hell did you let this happen, Attano?” Daud mutters.

“Coup,” Attano says. “Took us… by surprise. Traitors.”

“You’re the Royal Protector _and_ Royal Spymaster,” Daud says. “Wasn’t it your job to make sure shit like this doesn’t happen? Stretched yourself a bit too thin, if you ask me.”

“I didn’t,” Attano grunts, slumping in his chains, no fire in his voice, “ask you.”

“One or the other, Attano,” Daud says, unlocking the shackles around the Lord Protector’s wrists. He is too old, too desensitised, to wince at the sight of skin chafed raw and arms lashed almost to the bone, but he is hit with a surge of regret. “You can either block the assassin’s blade, or you can mastermind a spy network. Not both.”

Too late, he realises the implication.

“Are you… _mocking_ me?” Attano snarls, wrenching his bloodshot eyes open. “You sick fucking bastard –”

Daud catches him before he falls as the last shackle unlocks with a clunk, and hauls him up over his right shoulder. “I didn’t _have_ to make a pit stop,” he points out. “I’m looking for the Empress.”

“So you could shove your blade through her, too?”

Daud freezes. “I came to warn her.”

“Good job,” Attano grits out, voice muffled against the fabric of Daud’s coat.

“Now I’m just trying to get her out of Dunwall,” Daud says.

Attano doesn’t reply.

“If I can find her. Though there’s a slight problem,” Daud grunted, hefting Attano into a better position as he crouches low, navigating his way back out the way he came. “My boat’s trapped behind a blockade. I don’t suppose you’ve got any handy getaway vessels.”

“There’s a…” Attano starts to cough. “There’s a ship. The _Dreadful Wale_. On the day of the coup, Alexi gave me a… a message. From someone on the ship. Trying to tell me something… important. I… think.”

“The coup was last week ago, Attano. There’s no way the ship’s still there.”

“It is. I could see it from the cell window.”

“Hmph,” Daud says. “ _W–a–l–e_ or _W–h–a–l–e_?”

“…No ‘h’,” Attano slurs after a few moments.

The black-eyed bastard definitely has something to do with this.

“Farewell Daud,” he mutters to himself. Attano mumbles something then finally slumps in Daud’s hold, the last of his consciousness slipping away. Daud sighs, drains a vial of Addermire Solution, and blinks them up to the vents, to the railing, to the access pipe in the corner of the room, then across the rooftops, silent as a shadow.

The ship awaits them in the distance.

****

Daud doesn’t believe in luck or coincidences. Nor is he particularly devout – the Seven Strictures are uncomfortably cultish – and likewise is not especially heretical, despite the Outsider’s mark on the back of his left hand. He isn’t like those half-mad freaks who slit rats open and paint their bodies red with the blood of vermin, dancing around and crying out for the Outsider to take them, take them now!

But if there is one thing he believes in, it’s the sacredness of whales and the hand of the enigmatic little shit who rules them in a place beyond the physical world.

Billie Lurk – or Meagan Foster, as she hastily introduces herself – stands a few feet back from the scene unfolding before her, clutching her stump arm with the hand she has left. Old isn’t the right word for Billie, Daud thinks as Emily Kaldwin – recently deposed Empress of the Isles – draws in his features and realises who she’s looking at. Mature, maybe. Lost.

“ _You!_ ” the Empress cries. Her father’s blade is in her hand in a flash, lunging for his neck.

“Your Majesty, no!” Billie – Meagan – says.

Daud bends time, and the world flickers grey. Emily’s blade freezes in the air, inches from his throat. He steps aside, pausing for a moment to admire the speed and stance with which she executed her would-be lethal attack. Corvo has trained her well. A slower man – or a man not gifted with unnatural powers – would be dead.

Daud is not one of those men.

He steps behind the Empress, pulls her arms behind her back into a tight hold, disarms her, and brings her to her knees. Then time starts to flow once more.

She cries out, temporarily stunned at the perceived speed she thought he moved with, gasping in horror and her hand clenching around thin air, the folding sword out of her reach. “You _bastard_ –”

“You more than anyone in this world have the right to claim my life, Your Majesty,” Daud says. “But I didn’t go through all that trouble of getting your Protector out of imprisonment just to get my head sliced off as thanks.”

Emily struggles in his grip. “Get your hands off me,” she hisses. She tries to twist out of the lock – clever, he thinks – but he’d accounted for that and holds firm.

“Only if you promise you won’t kill me today.”

“So tomorrow’s fine, then?” she bites out.

“If I don’t persuade you otherwise – sure.”

She stops struggling, as though surprised. He releases her arms and she crawls straight over to her father, cradling his head in her lap as she brushes his hair from his forehead. Attano barely stirs; he murmurs something in his sleep, frowning and shivering. Emily soothes him, then glares up at Daud with a venom in her eyes that he has never seen in her father.

“What did you do to him?”

“ _I_ rescued him,” Daud says, affronted. “I can put him back where I found him, if you’d prefer.”

“No,” Emily says. “I – no.”

Billie – Meagan – kneels beside her, pressing the back of her only hand to Attano’s forehead. “He has a fever,” she says. “We’ll take him down into the cabin, get him comfortable. I should have enough beds for all of us.”

“Why did you rescue him?” Emily asks, watching Daud lift her father over his shoulder.

“I was looking for you,” Daud grunts.

“So you can shove a sword into another Empress?” she snaps.

Like father, like daughter. He senses rather than sees Billie – _Meagan_ , he thought, _Meagan_ – freeze behind them. Daud grimaces, shifting Attano’s weight.

“To warn you,” he says. “This’ll sound a bit far-fetched but just hear me out. I think I’m on to something that suggests there _might_ be a coup happening.”

Emily, predictably, doesn’t laugh.

Whatever, Daud thinks, and dumps Attano on the cabin bed a little harder than absolutely necessary.

****

“Daud…”

Her voice is different. Rougher.

“ _Meagan_ ,” Daud replies.

She steps closed to him, mouth drawn into a pinched line. “I searched for you.”

“I know.”

“Did you know this ship was mine?”

“Of course I did.”

She reaches for his arm; he jerks away at the last moment.

“Get us to Karnaca,” he orders, refusing to meet her one-eyed gaze. _Oh, Billie. Billie, what happened to you_. “I’ll stay out of your way if you stay out of mine.”

He pretends he can’t see the agony on her face, which is easier than pretending he doesn’t feel it himself.

** **

He dreams.

Not of Jessamine Kaldwin’s agonised eyes, or the blood that rushed across his gloved hand from the blade shoved hilt-deep into her gut. Not of Delilah, her mocking coos and deadly roses that wrapped around his limbs and paralysed him, helpless, while she consumed the mind of a girl who lost her innocence too soon. Not of Billie Lurk, the closest thing he ever had to a daughter, driving a knife between his shoulder blades, her eyes dark and cold. Not of Attano yanking his blade across Daud’s throat, both terrifying and releasing all at once.

He dreams of a place he hasn’t been to in fifteen long years. Cold and ancient, mellow with the distant sound of leviathans singing. It is like stepping into a long-forgotten memory.

_I know this place._

“You never cease to surprise me, Daud.”

That voice. Daud turns.

“You,” he says.

The Outsider appears as he always had; youthful yet ancient, fluid yet still as a statue. His black eyes hold Daud to the spot, as still as one of Delilah’s victims encased in stone.

“Hello, old friend. What a conundrum you find yourself in. What drove you to come to Dunwall again, after swearing never to return?”

“Don’t ask questions you already know the answer to,” Daud snaps.

The Outsider continues as though he hasn’t heard a thing. “Nostalgia? Guilt? Obligation?” He vanishes, then his voice appears from behind. “Your debt to young Emily was repaid fifteen years ago.”

Daud turns slowly, his mouth a foul grimace. “My debt to that girl will never be repaid,” he says.

The Outsider doesn’t smile, but Daud thinks – just maybe – it’s close enough. “And so here you are, on a traitor’s ship carrying a man who wants you dead to safety, so you can offer your services to a woman whose mother you drove a sword through.”

When he puts it like that, Daud knows for certain that the heretical god of the Void has a hand in this. _Doesn’t get involved, neutral party, my ass._ “What do you want?” he snaps.

“Perhaps I just wanted to say hello.”

“You’ve had fifteen years to say hello to me.”

“This is more interesting than watching you till soil.”

“I like tilling soil.”

“But you missed this more.”

The ache deep in his chest that he didn’t know had been there, for the first time in fifteen long years, feels sated. He doesn’t deny the Outsider’s words. Instead he turns, examining the surroundings.

Sated, like returning to a warm fireplace after months lost at the bitter ice sea, but this isn’t the Void he’d known. Its soft pastel blues like the shallow crystal waters of a Serkonan beach are gone; in its place, a swirling toxic grey, like the choke dust he used to throw at his enemies to blind and confuse them. The ground is like the cold marble encasing the Empress’s guards, shattered and yet conjoined. No landmarks float around them, water doesn’t stream the wrong way. Whales keen out in the distance, their mellow song permeating through the Void. And from the corner of his eye, a twisted, gnarled tree, choking the life from this place of eternity. Poisoning it, little by little.

 _Delilah_.

“I should have slit her throat when I had the chance,” Daud murmurs.

“I expected you to,” the Outsider says, to his left this time. “But you chose… dramatic irony instead. I never thought of you as poetic, Daud.”

He grimaces. “I’m not.”

“It was fascinating. A lifetime of blood, swift executions, but one death changed all of that. So instead of doing the task you did best, you trapped her in her own painting. Remarkable.” The Outsider tilts his head, observing Daud with cool regard. “Of course, how were you to know she would cling to existence, wander the Void with rage and vengeance in her heart and a will and a determination to survive that which would sunder any other?”

Fifteen years she has been steadily perverting this place, piece by piece, until she was ready to strike at the heart of the Isles itself.

“You could have asked for help,” Daud says. “If not from me, then surely your beloved Corvo would’ve…”

The Outsider stays silent.

Daud frowns. “You… didn’t know. Not until it was too late.”

There is neither a confirmation nor a denial. The Outsider looks off to the right, in the distance, and Daud follows his gaze. Corvo Attano, blinking in confusion as he staggers from a fevered sleep into the Void that is both familiar and poisoned, sees neither of them observing him from afar.

“It was rather careless of dear Corvo to lose my mark, wasn’t it?” the Outsider says, voice mild.

“That’s one interpretation,” Daud replies. He pauses, then starts to say, “Can you –”

The Outsider tilts his head to side again, waiting for Daud to continue.

“Can you… give it back to him?” Daud finally asks. Something akin to fear – dread, maybe? Sorrow? – thuds in time with his heart. “Or did Delilah permanently –”

“I can,” the Outsider says.

“…You should,” Daud says, a few beats later.

“It matters to you?” the Outsider asks, wry.

“Denying him those powers is like… denying Sokolov a paintbrush and canvas.”

The Outsider’s eyebrows rise ever so slightly, as if in surprise, and he smirks. “I thought you said you’re not poetic.”

Daud snarls. “Bite me, you black-eyed bastard.”

“You might as well show yourself,” Corvo speaks in the distance.

The black-eyed bastard laughs. “Oh, Daud. And you thought I didn’t miss you, my old friend.”

Daud wakes in his bed, his face damp with cold sweat and his mark burning like a bitch.

** **

Attano’s fever breaks shortly after they arrive in Karnaca, but he still doesn’t rouse. 

Emily Kaldwin kisses her father’s brow softly before she departs with the woman known as Meagan Foster, and lays on his bedside table the hideous, battered mask that terrorised the Dunwall nobility during the days of the plague. She imparts her daily threat on Daud’s life to him before leaving, taking with her the folding sword she no doubt wishes she could slide under Daud’s chin.

“I’ll be back with Dr Hypatia soon,” Emily says. “If he’s not awake by then, I’ll ask her to look over him.”

With luck, she’ll take care of the Crown Killer too. 

Dunwall must be populated by fools if any of them ever believed Corvo Attano was the Crown Killer. The man didn’t leave a single dead body in his wake, let alone mutilated corpses. More like Corvo the Mild Inconveniencer, Daud thinks, drawing a chair up beside the Royal Protector’s bedside. Corvo the Kleptomaniac. Corvo the Rooftop Menace. 

“I expect you to pay me back for the money you stole, by the way,” Daud says. “With interest.”

Perhaps it’s the thought of being forced to return something he pinched that rouses Attano. He stirs, mumbles a bit, and blinks blearily around to work out his surroundings, until his gaze lands on Daud.

“You,” he says, voice hoarse.

“Me,” Daud agrees.

“You – rescued me.”

“You were on the way to my actual goal.”

“You came to Dunwall to – warn us,” Attano says, his memories no doubt trickling back, like a leak in a dam about to break. “About Delilah. The coup.”

“Yes.”

The dam breaks. “ _Emily!_ ”

Attano starts to bolt upright. Daud stops him with a heavy hand on his shoulder, shoving him gently back down on the bed.

“She’s fine.”

“Where is she?”

“We’re in Karnaca. Meagan Foster’s boat, the _Dreadful Wale_. You’ve been out for five days fighting a fever.”

“I didn’t ask where _we_ are,” Corvo says. “I asked where _Emily_ is.”

“Meagan took her to land on the skiff. She’s tracking down the Crown Killer.”

Attano stares. “ _What?_ ” he yelps. “And you _let her_ –”

Again, Daud shoves him back down to the bed. Attano groans, still too weak to resist. “As if I could stop her. She’s more than capable,” Daud says. “You trained her well.”

Fatherly pride and the paternal urge to protect battle it out on his face.

“How did you know about Delilah’s plot?” Attano finally asks, unable to pick an emotion.

“I know a great many things,” Daud says. “I may have given up my life in Dunwall a long time ago, but I never stopped listening. Delilah has haunted your life for far longer than you realise.”

“Then she needs help,” Attano finally says, trying to sit up once more, and once more Daud doesn’t let him.

“She got help,” he replies. “Our mutual friend visited her.”

Not that Emily Kaldwin had said anything of the sort, but the change in her was obvious. Shoulders just that bit further back, the way she started favouring her left hand, mysteriously now wrapped in black cloth, a ‘band of mourning’ like her father’s.

“She’ll be better than you in no time,” Daud assures him.

“I never wanted that for her,” Attano whispers.

Daud leaves him to his angst.

** **

Hours pass. Meagan and Emily do not return. The sun begins to slip below the horizon, and fifteen years’ worth of curiosity, of _no closure_ , cannot be held back any longer.

“I have to ask, Attano,” Daud says, enacting Emily’s word to the law and refusing to allow Attano out of the bed for anything other than to relieve himself.

“Ask what,” Attano grumbles.

“Why you – spared me,” Daud says haltingly. “I had this whole speech planned out, you know. For when you finally came to confront me in the Flooded District. I was going to ask you to spare my life… tell you that something broke inside of me when I killed the Empress, so on and so forth. I was waiting and waiting – I knew damn well you’d break out of that pithy little prison. The hours stretched and you didn’t come, so I started to think maybe the poison did kill you after all. And then –”

Daud breaks off, an absurd laugh rising in his throat.

“And then,” he continues, “Thomas burst in to say you were gone. _Good_ , I thought. You were on your way. Then I put my hand on my belt out of instinct, and my goddamned money pouch was missing. And the key – snatched right off my desk, which I’d been standing at for hours. You sneaky fucking bastard – you didn’t even give me the chance to plead my case.”

Attano can’t help the wry smile twisting on his mouth. “You didn’t have to. I read your diary instead.”

Daud huffs. “So?”

“So what?”

“Why did you spare me?”

Attano stares at the back of his hand, bone and flesh knitted back together by some otherworldly power, where the Outsider’s mark once more flares there. Good, Daud thinks. He looked naked without it.

“I was tortured for six months in Coldridge Prison,” Attano eventually says, not looking up. “Those bastards Campbell and Burrows – they did everything imaginable. Burned hot iron into my back. Lashed me. Held my head under ice water until I breathed it in and started to drown, then stuck me in the iron lung machine until I coughed it all back out and could breathe on my own, just to start again. Ripped my fingernails out one by one until my voice was gone from screaming. You put anyone through that sort of treatment, you wouldn’t blame them for cutting everything and everyone in their path down, would you?”

He wouldn’t.

“So when I was slipped the key, I realised I could kill every single goddamn person in that prison, and they wouldn’t be able to stop me.” Attano narrows his eyes. “Or, I could be better.”

“You showed them mercy instead.”

“Mercy?” Attano laughs. “What I showed them wasn’t mercy. I said _better_ , not kinder. Cleverer. The fates I dealt out left my hands free of any blood – I promised I wouldn’t kill in Emily’s name. I wouldn’t start her reign with a waterfall of blood behind me, or her. But if you think I showed my targets mercy, Daud – then you don’t understand anything at all. Is it kinder to slit a man’s throat and let him die a swift and relatively painless death, or to arrange for him to be kidnapped in the dead of night, get his head shaved, his tongue cut out, and then shipped off to his own salt mine to be enslaved there for the rest of his life?” He laughs again. “ _Fuck_ mercy.”

Daud stays silent, sensing Attano isn’t finished his rant.

“When I was given my sword,” Attano says, “I decided there and then that it wouldn’t spill a drop of blood. I wouldn’t stain it with something so unworthy of its craftsmanship. I swore that I would only use it against _one_ person. The _only_ person who deserved to know what it felt like to have a sword through their gut.”

_Brown eyes, wide with horror and agony, the last breath on her lips whispering the name of her daughter –_

“Why didn’t you?” Daud asks.

“ _How many people did I kill for you?_ ” Attano says, and Daud’s blood runs as cold as the ice of Pandyssia. “ _None like the last. None like her. I’d give back all the coin if I could. No one should have to kill an Empress._ ”

He cannot speak; Attano has stolen his voice.

“And I hated you even more after that than I did before,” Attano says. “You murdered Jessamine. You took her life in exchange for money. No amount of money in the world could ever be worth what she was alive. I expected to find you arrogant and proud – the man who killed the Empress.”

Attano’s mouth twists.

“Instead, I found you _broken_.”

_No one should have to kill an Empress._

“So you dealt me my fate,” Daud finally speaks. “But how does snatching my coin pouch and my key even rival the fates of the Pendleton twins? Or Campbell, or Lady Boyle?”

Attano shakes his head. “You misunderstand. I hated you – because I couldn’t bring myself to punish you. I’d intended for you to be the only death that stained my blade. You couldn’t even let me have that, you goddamn bastard. Vengeance stayed my hand for all the others, but for you – mercy was what stayed my blade.”

“Regret it?”

“Maybe.” Attano sighs. “Did you?”

“…Maybe.”

The Royal Protector looks away. “The Outsider said you had dealings with Delilah fifteen years ago.”

Daud bows his head. “I killed the Empress and felt the world shatter,” he says. “The Outsider gave me a name. A second chance. Or a mystery, if you prefer. I uncovered a plot, I stopped it. It was… the least I owed.”

Attano, to his credit, does not sneer at the sentiment. “What sort of plot? A coup?”

Daud will never accuse Attano of having an imagination.

“I wonder,” Daud says, “if I hadn’t gotten involved how long would it have taken you to realise that the person staring out of Emily’s eyes wasn’t your beloved daughter. Days? Months? Years, even, if she played the part well enough?”

He pinches the bridge of his nose, squeezing his eyes shut to burn away the look of horror on Attano’s face.

“She was performing a ritual, using her paintings. I switched out her portrait of Emily with a painting of the Void. I thought it would – trap her. Forever.”

“Well done,” Attano drawls. “Did you even think to, you know, _kill her_?”

“Because _you_ had so much success driving your blade through her heart?” Daud shoots back.

“Point.”

“I considered it,” Daud admits. “But the Empress… she was…”

Attano completes his sentence. Steals his words. “She was different. She was your last.”

A long silence draws out between the two of them. Somewhere on the side of the boat, they hear a skiff drawing up alongside it, two female voices muttering to each other muffled by sheets of metal and the gentle crashing of waves against the hull.

“So what are we supposed to call you now?” Attano says as Daud stands. “The Butterknife of Dunwall?”

Daud narrows his eyes. “I liked you better when you didn’t talk.”

Attano laughs, and after a moment, Daud does too.


	2. II

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Corvo the Kleptomaniac strikes again.

_“Daud… don’t tell her about me. Please.”_

  ****

The former Empress of the Isles moves with a grace and beauty Daud has rarely seen. It’s hard to tell if it’s Corvo Attano’s style or not; Attano’s greatest trick in the days of old was convincing Dunwall he didn’t exist, and the only time Daud saw him in action was that day on the gazebo, dispatching his Whalers with fluid ease before they’d tethered him to the spot.

Empresses, Daud thought, were supposed to be regal. Refined. Empresses could wave a hand and her will would be done; soft, gentle hands that guide and nourish a nation should have no place holding instruments of death. No Empress should be able to jump across rooftops and slip through narrow cracks in the walls, or link the fates of three people together before she aims a bolt, deadly and true, at the throat of one of her victims.

 _I will take back what’s mine_ , Emily Kaldwin had said, and Daud doesn’t doubt her for a second. She’s terrifying. She’s beautiful. She’s everything in between. And perhaps the talk about Empress Emily Kaldwin I neglecting her duties in favour of rooftop-scouting at night wasn’t just talk after all.

“So this is how she spent her time instead of doing whatever it is that Empresses do?” Daud asks.

“She learned how to take care of herself,” Attano says, voice tight. “It was necessary.”

“If she were a common street rat, perhaps,” Daud says, watching Emily Kaldwin reach across the city with tendrils of the Void to yank herself across rooftops, vanishing into the distance. In another life he sees himself, the Knife of Dunwall, watching and assessing her, wondering if she would agree to join his ranks.

“You,” Attano sneers, “don’t get to judge.”

“I’m not saying you didn’t teach her well,” Daud continues, undeterred. “But you taught her the wrong things.”

“Because you know all about what it takes to be the leader of the Isles, do you?”

Given that he killed one Empress due to political machinations and knew of a coup long before her daughter did, Daud thinks he probably does know what it takes to at least _keep being_ Empress and not lose it all to a coup they should’ve seen coming miles away (don’t trust anyone but yourself, be personally involved in the Spymaster’s workings – he’s working on a list), but doesn’t share this insight. They catch up to Emily, who even though she wears a cloth to cover her face Daud knows is scowling.

“I don’t have time to stop and wait every time you two get into a debate about your philosophical differences,” Emily says. “If this is going to be a problem, one of you is going to have to stay with the ship.” She narrows her eyes at Daud. “And trust me, it _won’t_ be my father.”

“Emperor Daud here thinks he could’ve done a better job than you at the throne,” Attano snitches.

“No wonder a coup happened,” Daud snaps back. “Your Royal Spy-Protector obviously has a penchant for passing on misleading information.”

“Enough!” Emily orders. “Father, I’m going to look ahead for an alternate path just in case, but I need you to break into the Overseer’s office to find the code to take the carriage the rest of the way to the mansion. Daud –”

He awaits his instructions.

“Just… try not to be so… _you_.”

He’s spent the last fifteen years trying not to be so _him_. It began with the death of an extraordinary woman, an event which plunged a city into chaos and terror, and ended when the whispers of a name he’d tried so very hard to forget made their way to the fields where he turned rough, rich soil in his hands and nudged seedlings to flourish into rows upon rows of grapes in his vineyard in Cullero.

It was nice, not being _him_. Quiet. Daud isn’t sure he’d call what he felt on that vineyard _happiness_ ; happiness has always seemed an abstract concept, reserved for those too sheltered from the world to ever know the depths of depravity that people are capable of sinking to. _Happiness_ is akin to the myths of Pandyssia – not impossible, but highly unlikely and not something Daud expects to experience firsthand in this lifetime, or any other he may live.

No. Daud, Knife of Dunwall, died the night Empress Jessamine Kaldwin did. Daud, vigneron, is… content, maybe. A person he much prefers being, if nothing else.

Thomas disagreed.

“Retirement doesn’t suit you, boss.”

Daud had snorted, the way he always did when Thomas came to harass him or urge him into taking one job (non-lethal, now, always non-lethal) or another during his self-imposed exile. “I don’t hear you complaining about the free shipments of wine you get.”

The Whalers, such as they are these days, have dispersed across the continents. Most followed him to Serkonos, now under Thomas’s more than satisfactory leadership; others stayed behind in Dunwall to make new lives for themselves or forge their own paths. News on that front fell silent a couple of years ago after Galia got involved in something stupid that ended with her dead and Rinaldo imprisoned for several weeks before… arrangements were made to bring him to Serkonos instead.

(There are exceptions to every retirement.)

“You asked me to swing by if I ever heard anything interesting,” Thomas had said.

“Yeah?” Daud prompted.

“Delilah.”

He felt a thorned rose creep up his back, wrap around his spine. “What of her?”

“We’ve heard… whispers.”

That was a year ago.

To help Emily Kaldwin, he can’t be Daud, cultivator of a Cullero vineyard, but Emily Kaldwin doesn’t want him to be Daud, Knife of Dunwall either, which puts him in a slight fix. Finding a third identity seems tedious and unnecessary, so she’ll take what she’s damn well given until he works out what she really wants and either claims his life or decides to tolerate him.

Of course, Daud has never had to work alongside the person who killed his mother, so given the circumstances he thinks he can be patient while she figures her feelings out.

He hangs back to keep watch. He wasn’t lying to Attano – the girl _is_ capable, and this is her fight, so he’ll stay out of her way until she needs him. The way it’s been since her mother died; the way it will _always_ be. So he slips through open windows and tags her in the distance, to gather intel and keep an eye on her to make sure she doesn’t do anything _too_ hot-headed. He doesn’t doubt the young Empress with fire in her heart and vengeance in her eyes, but it’s his experience that jobs done without the full picture get botched, and it would be a terrible shame for her quest against Delilah to crumble like so many other unrealised dreams in this decaying world.

The Crown Killer has been dealt with; Dr Alexandria Hypatia, one of the few truly decent people on this corroding Jewel of the South, is dead. Kirin Jindosh’s clockwork mansion is their next target – the last known location of Anton Sokolov. Another piece to the puzzle that Daud and Meagan began, apart but at the same time with different reference shots, not even realising they were working on the same picture.

Billie. Clever, ambitious Billie. Friend and traitor, brave and damaged. Billie – _Meagan_ – who still has not told Emily about how she knows Delilah. About what she _did_.

Like many other things in his life, it’s easier to ignore the problem than deal with it.

An hour passes; Emily scouts ahead, Daud assesses the mansion from the outside for potential alternate entrances, and Corvo Attano returns only moments after Daud makes a poor joke about him getting stomped on while possessing a rat and earns himself a withering glare.

“Where were you?” Emily hisses at her father, who manages to look sheepish without even removing the mask. “I’ve been waiting at this gate for almost an hour! Any longer and they’ll realise the Wall of Light’s been rewired when some idiot guard walks through it!”

Daud wants to know the answer to that too, especially when Attano shifts almost guiltily.

“I was… getting the codes to the carriage. Which I have,” Attano says.

“It took you an _hour_ to get those codes?” Daud asks dubiously. “You’re getting old, Attano.”

Emily narrows her eyes. “Turn out your pockets.”

Daud knows Attano has a tendency to steal everything within a hundred-metre vicinity of himself; the Whalers lost about a thousand coins in the several hours the Royal Kleptomaniac spent sneaking his way through the Flooded District fifteen years ago. But this is _ridiculous_. Attano shamefacedly pulls bags and pouches of coins from his never-ending pockets – at least, Daud thinks, five hundred coins’ worth. Then the bone charms and runes, then the raw whale bone, then the carefully rolled up early Sokolov portrait that he removes from his inside coat pocket.

“Outsider’s balls, Attano,” Daud says, thinking not for the first time that those six months in Coldridge may have unhinged him more than initially suspected.

Emily stares at the small fortune. “Where did you get all this money.”

It’s an accusation, not a question. Attano mumbles a vague answer about it ‘just lying around’.

The deposed Empress throws up her arms. “I thought I broke you of this habit, father!”

Daud steals a bone charm while neither of them are looking.

“I can’t believe this,” Emily says. “You’re the most feared assassin in all of Dunwall and all you could think to do here was _loot_ the city?”

“I didn’t actually assassinate anyone back then, you know,” Attano points out. “But a _hell_ of a lot of very confused guards and Overseers woke up on rooftops without their pants and valuables.”

That explains a lot about the way he found his Whalers after Attano snatched his coin pouch and key. At the time he’d snapped at his men for getting randy and falling asleep on the job. Daud reaches out for another bone charm, but this time Attano slaps his hand away.

“That’s for Emily! Scavenge your own stuff.”

“I _would_ ,” Daud says, “if you hadn’t cleared the city already. I didn’t think it was possible for one single person to cause an economic crisis purely by pickpocketing, and yet –”

“Oh, shut up, both of you,” Emily snaps. “Either find a room and get whatever this is –” she waves a hand between the two of them, “– out of the way, or concentrate on the task at hand!"

Daud expects Attano's expression mirrors his own perfectly: abject horror.

“We’re here to deal with Jindosh and rescue Anton, so both of you get in the carriage,” Emily continues. She points at her father. “No more stealing,” she orders, then points at Daud. “And _you_.”

He raises his eyebrows.

“Don’t make me regret not killing you when I had the chance.”

Charming girl. _Remarkable_ , as the Outsider had murmured last night, with far too much intensity and breathlessness than was necessary for an immortal whale god of the Void to possess.

Daud’s not sure he likes where that’s going, but that, like many other things, is simply none of his business.


	3. III

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Outsider's interest in Corvo and Emily is none of Daud's business.

_YOU KILLED HER YOU KILLED HER YOU KILLED HER YOU KILLED HER_

_** ** _

Matters of sex and romance rarely factor into Daud’s life or priorities. There were a few times when he was a younger man, and that sort of thing was just _expected_ of him by people he didn’t call friends, but the lasting impression of those encounters left him uncomfortable in his own skin. There was always the odd Whaler here and there who tried to seduce him, to no avail. Out in the relative seclusion of his Cullero vineyard there were few around to continue to irritate him with actions and feelings he has no urge to satiate and no desire to reciprocate.

This does not mean he is incapable of appreciating the various aesthetic qualities of others. For example, he is aware of Emily Kaldwin’s handsome features. _Beautiful_ isn’t the right word – her mother was beautiful, with full lips and a delicate jawline and wide brown eyes that were just a little too innocent. Emily Kaldwin is more her father than she is her mother; harder, like steel, a firm jawline, lips almost in a constant dismayed line, and eyebrows creased almost identically to her father’s, the strength of her features that are darker than Jessamine’s betraying her Serkonan heritage.

The logic then follows that Corvo Attano is handsome, too. While Daud doubts Jessamine was shallow with her taste in bed partners, he’s certain that Attano’s attractiveness did not go unnoticed by the late Empress. Even Delilah reportedly considers Attano a good-looking man, and it’s true, he’s aged well – far better than Daud himself has. The six months in Coldridge Prison that turned Attano into an emaciated wreck of a human being was negated – at least physically – by fifteen years of fine dining and all the comforts that the royal palace has to offer. His face is not that of the gaunt, haunted man Daud saw in the Flooded District; his body is stronger and his voice is not unpleasant to listen to. A bit too shaggy, perhaps. He could use a haircut. And a shave. And a shower.

Not that Daud would be thinking about this under normal circumstances, but the Outsider has so far called Attano ‘fascinating’ one too many times and Emily ‘remarkable’ another few too many times, and Daud’s beginning to think he’s talking about more than just their personalities.

“Your Kaldwin fetish is none of my business,” Daud says, outraged that he even has to spell it out.

The corner of the Outsider’s mouth twists into what could be constituted as a smile. “But you do not disagree, my old friend.”

That’s not the point. The point was that he only visited the shrine because he wanted the runes, not because he wanted to receive an unsolicited poetry lecture about Corvo’s and Emily’s finer qualities.

“That’s not the point,” Daud says, in case it needs to be said.

“The point is that you care for them,” the Outsider continues. Daud wonders if the poisoned Void, Delilah’s touch, has addled the Outsider in some undiscernible way. Made him more dynamic, or flirtatious than he used to be, with more of a whisper to a voice that Daud doesn’t remember being quite so melodic. Certainly he seems more interactive.

“My debt to the Kaldwins is none of _your_ business.”

“A debt, or something more, Daud? You’re demonstrating a loyalty to the both of them that not even the woman you considered a daughter showed to y–”

“ _Don’t_ ,” Daud snarls. “Don’t you _dare_ talk about that.”

The Outsider smirks. “Farewell, Daud,” he says, and Daud returns to the world, his left fist clenched and his mark burning as though the Void itself is laughing at him.

It’s not that he thinks Corvo and Emily will forgive him. They tolerate him, that’s enough. Forgiveness, much like happiness and sex, is a foreign concept to him. It is something unattainable – something he’s undeserving of, and something he’s not even sure he wants. The point of owing a debt is that it must be paid; blood cannot simply be washed away.

** **

_**Cullero, Serkonos:** This city is crowded in the warmer months, and for a good reason. You’ll find yourself shoulder to shoulder with scantily clad locals and foreigners on holiday, pale skin burned pink by the sun, which somehow seems larger and brighter in Serkonos. The food in Cullero is a shining example of Serkonan cuisine, and there is always music, always dancing. Hand-rolled on the steps of tobacco shops, the cigars are of course fresher than the ones you’ve had shipped to other parts of the Empire._

**_[Excerpt from Ports of Call, a guide to port cities across the Empire of the Isles]_ **

** **

“Oh, no,” Anton Sokolov, still bruised and frail but much better once he's rested, moans. “Not you.”

“Now that’s just plain fucking rude,” Daud says. “I rescued your painting and everything.”

Sort of. It has a deep gouge down the middle where he’d used the easel as a shield against the clockwork soldier, but it’s the thought that counts.

Kirin Jindosh is not, as Daud expected to hear, dead. He’s alive, but probably wishes he _was_ dead, now that his mind has been turned to mush and he’s barely capable of stringing a coherent sentence together, his brilliant brain destroyed by the very device he used to torture Sokolov.

It’s ingenious, and it has ‘Corvo Attano’ written all over it. Emily’s face is set into a dour grimace, displeased but not resentful of her father's interference. In time, Daud hopes, she’ll realise that it was the better course of action. A bloodless act of vengeance. She’s young; she was introduced to death at a young age, and witnessing that sort of act does one of two things to a person – it either deters them, or it desensitises them.

People like Emily – people like Daud, desensitised far too young – burn hot, then burn up.

Daud adds his notes to the briefing once Sokolov is well enough to sit up and converse with Emily. The Abbey of the Everyman, ever fanatical and nosy, have been looking into Breanna Ashworth’s movements and suspect her of being involved in the Occult, and may have notes pertaining to the matter – a fact that Meagan confirms.

“There’ll be a Grand Guard presence outside the Royal Conservatory,” Meagan says. “Inside, be prepared for anything. Ashworth is important to Delilah, and she runs with an… eclectic crowd. They’ll be the real danger.”

Because she knows all about that particular crowd, doesn’t she? Meagan doesn’t look at Daud while she says this, but her posture is tense, her voice wary.

“Someday I’d like to know more about how you met Ashworth,” Emily says, her tone indicating that someday, this question will not be a request.

_Yes, Billie, why don't you go ahead and tell her._

“I know you would,” Meagan says, and this time, she does glance towards Daud, only for a second, not long enough for Corvo or Emily to notice.

Daud looks away.

Meagan drops them off in the skiff at Cyria Gardens in the dead of night, under the cover of the canal. Emily leaves Corvo and Daud to their own devices to infiltrate the Overseer’s outpost, while she assesses the Conservatory itself.

Corvo continues to rob the city blind despite his daughter’s disapproval. There’s not much Daud can do to stop that, even if he wanted to, though it does reach ridiculous extremes when the Royal Protector carries so many bone charms that he sounds like a windchime every time he so much as breathes.

Daud purchases extra pockets that can be sewn into a jacket.

“Good choice,” the gentleman behind the barred counter says, nodded in approval. “Best to keep your items close. The black markets have had two break-ins so far. Not this one, though – we’re locked down tight.”

Daud narrows his eyes, thanks the shopkeeper in coin and a vague promise to check in on his associate, and leaves.

“So I hear there have been two black market shop robberies,” Daud says to Corvo, while they rifle through the Vice Overseer’s office.

Corvo coughs. “Two? That’s… terrible,” he says.

There isn’t enough wine in his vineyard to deal with this.


	4. IV

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Parallels and paradoxes.

_What would I find if I went back to Serkonos? Would I find that it has rotted from the inside, just like Dunwall, or will it only appear that way because I’m the one who’s rotted?_

** **

Ashworth is dead, and her coven in the Royal Conservatory neutralised. Daud leaves a tip with the Vice Overseer’s office – proof of Ashworth’s corruption and infiltration of the Oracular Order, but the immediate danger is over. It’s not how he’d have done it, and probably not how Corvo would have done it either, but Ashworth collaborated with Delilah Copperspoon and Emily’s definition of mercy is not the same as her father’s. What’s done is done and they have the information they need.

“Emily…” Meagan says, when they’ve returned to the skiff. “Back when I lived in Dunwall, I did some things that I’m not proud of.”

Daud stills, pretending not to listen while he prepares the skiff.

“Isn’t that a requirement for citizenship?” Emily replies, ever wry.

Meagan doesn’t laugh. “What I’ve got to say is not a joke,” she says. “I knew Delilah and Ashworth. Bought into their bullshit, which led me down a bad road.”

A bad road. He almost audibly snorts. Daud, for all his sins, is at least honest about what he was and what he did. What he _is_.

“I don’t want to get into it right now, but I felt like you deserved to know.” Meagan pauses, and the words she speaks next are not just for Emily. “There are things I regret.”

No need to waste breath with apologies or excuses. He taught her that.

Emily thanks her for opening up, just a little, but Daud senses that when push comes to shove and the truth is laid out bare on the table, the Empress of the Isles will not be so accepting.

But that’s Meagan’s problem, not his.

** **

Emily wants to go to Overseer Liam Byrne for help. Corvo wants to enlist the Howlers.

Daud thinks both of them should be boxed up and shipped off to Pandyssia, but Corvo and Emily don’t much care for his opinion.

Aramis Stilton’s house is their target. No one knows what happened in there three years ago, but its effects have been felt all across Serkonos. On the grand scheme of things, the mines fell into the corrupt hands of Duke Luca Abele; on a small scale, Meagan Foster’s arm and scarred face. The only way into the mansion is through the Jindosh lock, which Daud thinks is overkill.

Father and daughter come to an agreement: they’ll scout out the respective areas, find out what information they can, and see if it’s enough to get past the Jindosh lock blockading Aramis Stilton’s house from the public without resorting to the aid of either religious fanatics or ethically-questionable gangs.

Emily and Corvo possess a sort of symbiosis. Corvo hugs her. She kisses his cheek. They talk, they laugh, they tease, they argue, they don’t talk at all because they don’t _need_ to. They silently anticipate what the other needs, Corvo crafting bone charms and runes to aid Emily’s strength and stamina and Emily arranging for fresh fruit to be brought to his cabin.

_Family_ , he thinks, and he remembers a cold night at the height of the Month of Ice when he and his Whalers gathered around a hearth to roast rats on skewers, laughing at some ridiculous joke that Rulfio had cracked. Thomas and Rinaldo, who’d saved some coin together and presented Daud with a book about the myths of Tyvia. Billie, always at his side, her head tilted up and a smile on her face as she teased him about getting old when his sword elbow creaked from the cold, and his chest aches for what he’s lost. For what he’ll never have again.

He remembers a younger man and a much younger woman, bound not by blood but by something else just as powerful, gently teasing each other and risking neck and limb for each other. He remembers Billie as a girl, following him through the night after watching him pick off three targets one after the other within five minutes, her eyes wide not with horror but with fascination. Curiosity. Always so curious, wanting to learn more. He remembers her trailing him, so convinced she was hidden well, all the way back to his base of operations. He remembers her form – self-taught, extremely capable if unrefined – and he remembers seeing something in her that he saw every day in the mirror. The tilt of her stubborn jaw when he confronted her, the fire in her eyes – _we_ _burn hot, then burn up_ – and the reaction it stirred in him. Admiration. A desire to protect. A desire to _nourish_.

She’s changed, but at the same time has not. She still watches Daud closely when she thinks he doesn’t notice, studying his decisions, each move he makes. This time it doesn’t raise the hairs on the back of his neck, or disconcert him the way it did fifteen years ago when she all but drove a knife through his back. He lets her watch him, not because he takes pleasure in her grief and longing but because he doesn’t know what else to do.

It was his own fault for thinking of her as something more than just another assassin under his command. Isn’t that the way of things? Master assassin trains a younger generation; the younger generation learns until they think they know better and then betray their teacher. Then they become the teacher to a new generation, and the cycle repeats, over and over and over again, each teacher never believing that kind of treachery will reach them the way they themselves enacted it.

He should have known, but love, he supposes, is blinding. A mistake he will not make again.

What he feels when he watches Corvo and Emily is not jealousy. It’s envy, but he has no delusions about inserting himself into the fold. He and Corvo understand each other; Emily accepts his presence. He doesn’t presume to get more involved than tagging along and making sure Corvo doesn’t bankrupt Serkonos purely via pickpocketing. A man still needs to make a living here afterwards.

Beyond that, though, Daud doesn’t feel the need now to follow them both to make sure they don’t die. Not that he ever doubted their abilities; trailing them is more for his own peace of mind than it is true babysitting. Corvo always was ingenious and resourceful with his gifts from the Outsider, and Emily is like a shadow, but Daud has had his gifts for longer than the two of them combined and knows how to _not_ misjudge the distance between rooftops.

He teaches Corvo how to freeze time while plummeting to an almost-certain death, so that he can transverse to a safe landing instead of smearing himself across the streets after a hundred-metre drop. Emily’s set of skills are different and she cannot manipulate space/time like Daud and Corvo can – her talents are more refined, like puppet master pulling strings – but now at least she can slow the world while falling.

He waits by the Jindosh lock for Corvo and Emily to return instead of rendezvousing with Meagan. Maybe he’ll get lucky and stumble over the riddle’s answer by accident; maybe his lungs will fill up with dust from the storms that blow in every few minutes. It says something about him that he’d rather suffocate in a dust storm than deal with Meagan, but what that ‘something’ is, he isn’t entirely sure.

** **

The Outsider and Emily Kaldwin are locked in a dance that began the moment he appeared to her and will probably not end for many years. There’s a certain chemistry that electrifies the air when the Outsider slides off the edge of the piano and begins to pace the room. He speaks only to Emily, and she paces in time with him, step for step, apart but in perfect synchronisation while he talks.

“Three years ago something inside Aramis Stilton snapped like a cheap lock. A part of him, and a part of this house, never left that evening,” he breathes, black eyes never leaving Emily’s gaze. “The Duke’s inner circle are still gathered here, setting their grand plan into motion. Delilah’s plan. And a part of Aramis Stilton is always here, still breaking.”

Daud has an ugly feeling that this is going to get a lot more complicated than what he originally signed on for.

Corvo is frowning. “I’m not sure I like where this is going,” he murmurs, watching the Empress and the Outsider circle each other.

“You’re just jealous because you’re not his special friend anymore,” Daud replies. It results in an elbow to the gut, but it was so very worth it.

** **

The Empress’s orders are simple:

“Don’t. Touch. _Anything_.”

Corvo touches everything.

He loots loose coins when Emily slips them back into the past; he sneaks into the vault in the present and then uses the past to knock down a rather hideous statue just so that he sneak into another room to loot _more_ stuff. He swipes a key right off the table where several guards are sitting at and gets spotted standing smack in the middle of the corridor by about five servants who immediately freak out until Emily yanks them back to the present. The man seems determined to cause a time paradox, as though Delilah wasn’t enough of a blight on the world and the Void. Emily leaves her father with Daud with strict instructions to not let him do anything else stupid while she finds the code to enter the sealed off area to witness the ritual that brought Delilah back.

“I bet if I knock Stilton out then he’ll miss whatever’s going to happen that turns him crazy,” Corvo suggests, aiming his crossbow across the garden to the gazebo where Stilton paces restlessly. Above him, shrouded by shadows, is Emily, waiting for the chance to steal his notebook. “Or miss what _did_ happen, I guess, if we’re being technical.”

The ugly feeling intensifies. “Emily said not to touch anything.”

“I wouldn’t be touching him _directly_ ,” Corvo protests. “I’d be sleep-darting him.”

“I’m pretty sure that still counts as you doing something stupid.”

“Oh, come on. What harm could it possibly do?”

** **

“ _What happened?_ ” Emily hisses. “What did you _do?_ ”

“Uh,” Corvo says. “So you know how you said not to touch anything?”


	5. V

_No one will ever know exactly what it took to save Emily Kaldwin from a living death as Delilah’s puppet. No one except the Outsider, who watches everything and thinks his own dark thoughts and speaks to few in any generation. I’ve learned that our choices always matter to someone, somewhere. And sooner or later, in ways we can’t always fathom, the consequences come back to us. I came from Serkonos to Dunwall as a boy, made my living as a killer, one of the few who’ve heard the Outsider’s voice. I murdered an Empress but saved her daughter, who will one day rule the Empire. Those were my choices._

_I’m ready for what comes._

** **

“Look around you. A crumbling island at the very edges of the Void. But this one is special. It’s the place where my throat was cut, four thousand years ago. This is where my life ended, and where it began again. It’s where they made _me_.”

There are some things, Daud thinks, that should not be shared. Like this. This isn’t his business. He doesn’t need to know any of this. He doesn’t _care_ to know any of it. He’s never held the Outsider to any particularly high deification regard, but there’s something disconcerting about finding out the Outsider was once as human as the rest of them, a lamb to the slaughter – a whale being drained of its oil, singing its song of agony for days on end until it finally succumbs to the pain.

“Now you know Delilah’s secret. At the end of her days at Daud’s hand, she drifted through the Void and should have been lost forever. But her will and cunning are second to none. She found this place, the island in the Void where I became what I am. It changed her and she discovered a way to draw from it, tapping into the here.”

The Void, to Daud, should smell of salt water, fresh and light while whales sing in the background and swim through the soft light blues of the expanse, an ocean without the water. Here, at this ancient place, it _should_ smell of cold granite and blood, but instead it smells of rotting roses and the ground beneath his feet is a bed of thorned stems, the air choked with the dust from the silver mines and the distant sound of Delilah’s mocking laughter drowning out the music of the creatures sacred to the black-eyed bastard. The twisted, gnarled trees erupt from the ground, knotting through the world and staining it black as ink.

“Delilah is… a part of me now,” the Outsider speaks, holding Emily’s gaze, always Emily. She stares back, her jaw set and her eyes firm, a silent promise passing between the two of them. “And I don’t like it.”

** **

It occurs to him that Meagan’s personal issue with the Duke is about more than just Delilah’s machinations.

The story is long forgotten now, but Daud remembers it well. Billie Lurk, the pariah of the Dunwall underground, a wanted fugitive for the murder of Radanis “Dandy” Abele, Duke Luca’s equally revolting brother. It was a crime of passion, not an assassination – a life for a life, after Radanis claimed that of Billie’s lover Deirdre.

And to think the Outsider would have them all believe that he doesn’t interfere, the hypocritical bastard.

Meagan, of course, doesn’t bring any of this up at all during the debriefing, for which Aramis Stilton is jarringly present.

“At the Palace, the Duke has a lookalike body double, meant to confuse assassins. A friend of mine washes the linens and said the double is a smoker, if that helps. Maybe you can talk to him. She says he’s a nice guy.”

“I’ll deal with the Duke and his freeloader however I see fit,” Emily says.

Emily was not born in Serkonos, but Daud and Corvo were. He doesn’t need to meet Corvo’s eyes to know that the man is thinking the same thing: you can take the boy out of Serkonos but you can’t take Serkonos out of the boy, as the cliché goes, and a young man’s love for his place of origin, no matter the experience, can be a hard thing to go against. The sun kisses their skin and fine wine flows through their veins, southern blood that is just a little too warm to ever truly be comfortable in the steely cold nights of Gristol. Jewels aren’t supposed to corrode but Karnaca has been sick for years, a malignant cancer at the heart of this once vibrant city infecting everything until only the dusty ashes of its cremation will remain in its wake.

Byrne and Paolo still live. Stilton’s sanity has been returned, or never left, or whatever the explanation is when time paradoxes are involved. The city’s diseased heart beats feebly under the grip of a tyrant, but there may yet be enough blood left in it to circulate new life into the land.

Every action has a consequence.

“Once you’re inside the Grand Palace, whatever you do could affect things in Karnaca for years to come,” Anton Sokolov had said. “Remember that.”

 _Will you be this city’s saviour, Empress_ , Daud wonders, watching the skiff disappear into the night, _or will you be the one to push it over the edge?_

** **

Sokolov paints below deck, a split portrait of a man and a woman – one half a mask of death, the other an Empress with steel in her gaze. Daud’s appreciation of art is limited to wine-tasting, and even that took a while to cultivate. Sokolov’s portraits have always felt rather dour to him; the colour palate too dull, the lines too strict and restrained with their determination to capture a truth and a reality about their subjects. Corvo collects the Sokolov portraits, but it’s hard to know if he does this because he likes the works or because he wants to sell them on the black markets, and then presumably steal them again.

“What will you do after all this, old man?” Daud asks, watching him with his paintbrush and canvas. He may not appreciate the final product, but watching him in his realm is not unlike watching Corvo or Emily in the embrace of the Void’s magic – entrancing.

Sokolov huffs. “Paint. Travel. Explore. Do whatever it is that people my age are supposed to do. I hear you make decent wines.”

“First crate is on me.”

“And you, Daud, Knife of Dunwall? What will you do?”

Presumably he’ll return to Cullero and his quiet life, away from the black-eyed bastard’s machinations and far, far away from Dunwall. Away from Corvo and Emily until such a time that they need him again.

Away from Billie Lurk and the memories she stirs.

He does his best not to think about any of this until Meagan returns with Corvo and Emily.

“Emily has what she needs to take Delilah down once and for all,” Meagan tells him later. “Corvo made… arrangements with the Duke.”

Daud grunts. “Did he, now.”

“We’re heading back to Dunwall at first light.”

He nods.

She begins to leave, but he stops her. “Meagan.”

How easily she answers to that name, he thinks as she turns.

“What made you decide to help Emily?” he asks. “There’s nothing for you to gain by aiding her, and she won’t thank you when you tell her the truth about yourself. You could’ve ignored it all and gone on living your life.”

“What life?” Meagan scoffs. “Captain of a crewless ship, drifting from one continent to another in search of –”

She breaks off, shaking her head, but he can make an educated guess. There’s only one thing an unwanted, abused child who left home at the age of six could want. It was never about becoming the best thief and assassin she could to avoid the often-inevitable fate of other children like her, innocence lost long before they ran out of coin with no other choice but to sell the only thing left a penniless gutter rat _can_ sell. It wasn’t even about becoming a ship captain, though she’s certainly made a fine one.

For him, it wasn’t about becoming a vigneron either, but he’s made do, given the circumstances.

Meagan sighs. “It’s the least I owed her,” she finishes lamely.

“You didn’t kill that girl’s mother.”

“I as good as, and then some,” Meagan says. “It wasn’t enough for me to join you on that mission. I had to fall for Delilah’s bullshit too, and almost ruined Emily’s life twice over.” She sighs again, a song of regret escaping her lips, and closes her eyes as she leans forward against the edge of the _Dreadful Wale_. “And not just _her_ life.”

Daud leans against the railing too, beside her, not quite close enough to be remembered of the time they sat beside each other before the hearth, all those years ago. “You think you owe _me_?”

“Don’t I?” she whispers.

Does she? He hasn’t thought about it in those terms before, but then, like many other things in his life that cause emotional strife, he hasn’t thought about it much at all beyond the pain that still resonates as sharply as though it happened yesterday.

No. She doesn’t owe him anything. She repaid that debt the moment she confessed to her betrayal; he forgave her the moment she knelt before him and held her sword out, offering her life to him.

He pinches the bridge of his nose. “You don’t owe me anything, Billie. There’s no debt between us.”

She clasps her hands together, fists so tight that the whites of her knuckles strain against her dusky skin. “Then why can’t you look at me?”

So he looks at her, and lets her see _him_. The blunted Knife, the broken man Corvo Attano saw fit to spare out of merciful pity, the vigneron whose ambitions cut short just shy of happiness because what right does he have in this world, curdled so much by his own hand, to be _happy_.

“Oh…” she whispers. “Daud…”

She reaches for him, and he’s reminded of Emily and the envy that ached through his bones when he saw her crawl over to her father and cradling his head in her lap as she brushed the hair from his forehead. Daud lets Billie hold him, and eventually he too finds himself returning the embrace.

Love is a mistake. One he thinks he’s glad to make again.

** **

“You knew.”

“I know a lot of things. To what are you referring?”

“You knew about Meagan. Billie. She was _yours_ , and then she betrayed you, and you didn’t say a word. You let me _trust_ her.”

“It wasn’t my confession to make.”

“I am your Empress,” Emily says. “You don’t get to withhold information like that due to a technicality.”

“Then in future, do yourself a favour and find a Spymaster,” Daud advises. “A _proper_ one, who doesn’t double up with bodyguard duties.”

“Are you offering?” Emily sneers.

“Are you asking?” Daud shoots back.

She barks a laugh. “You can consider your debt to me repaid by your service, Knife of Dunwall,” she says, “but if I ever see you around my city again, I _will_ take what is owed.”

A life for a life.

“My debt to you will never be repaid,” he says quietly.

“That’s your problem,” she says. She burns too brightly. “I don’t care about your guilt complex. I’m taking the skiff and I’m going with Corvo to take down Delilah. Do with yourself as you see fit.”

“You might need my help.” He has, after all, confronted her once and come out on top. To… relative, if temporary, success.

“I won’t. Unlike you,” Emily says, voice as cold as the iron of her sword, “I plan on finishing the job I started.”

Choices always matter to someone, somewhere. Sooner or later, in ways that cannot be fathomed, those consequences always come back. He murdered an Empress but saved her daughter, who will rule the Empire with steel in her eyes and blood on her hands.

He bows to her, unsure whether what he feels is pride or fear. She leaves, and does not look back.

Corvo approaches afterwards. “ _Were_ you offering?” he asks, because the Royal Spy-Protector is still trying to do two jobs at once and has no respect for private conversations.

“Again,” Daud says, “are you asking?”

“If I did, would you say yes?”

“Your daughter the Empress has already declared under no uncertain terms that she wants me nowhere near Gristol. I know it’s not much to look at, but I’m rather fond of my head and I can’t tend to a vineyard if it’s mounted on a pike outside Dunwall Tower.”

“She’s still young,” Corvo says. “Despite all of this, she still sees the world in black and white.”

“I killed her mother,” Daud says. “There aren’t many shades of grey there.”

“No,” Corvo agrees. “She will never forgive you for that. I won’t, either. But you were never after forgiveness, were you?”

He doesn’t need to answer.

The corner of Corvo’s mouth twists into a wry smile. “Give her time. I’ll be in touch with you, Butterknife. Assuming I survive. And assuming you’d like to do something a bit more interesting with your life than grow grapes, of course.”

Royal Spymaster Daud. There’s a certain poetic irony to it. “I like growing grapes.”

“You missed this more.”

Which is exactly why he wants to go back to Cullero. “I’m not bowing to you, you kleptomaniac,” Daud says. “Don’t die.”

The world would be a poorer (richer?) place without Corvo Attano in it. And besides, Corvo still owes him money. With interest.

Corvo holds out his hand. Daud stares at it before grasping it back.

** **

He dreams.

Not of a world of dust and darkness, a well poisoned by the bitter ink of a cunning, ambitious witch. Not of a corrupted ancient altar, where rotting roses and thorned stems choke the sacred purity from the expanse.

He dreams of a Void the colour of the crystal clear Serkonan beach, streams of water running upwards in defiance of gravity and sense. He dreams of whales swimming past, singing their sad but beautiful songs. In the corner of his eye he thinks he can see the last remnants of the darkness fading like choke dust long after it’s been deployed. It will stain, but the smell of clear salt water will wash it away in time.

“She’s dead, then?” Daud asks, not even waiting for the Outsider to appear.

“Emily Kaldwin is nothing if not true to her word,” he replies from behind. Daud turns, his eyes narrowed and his arms crossed over his chest.

“You planned for all of this to happen,” he accuses.

The Outsider smiles, pacing up beside him. “You give me far too much credit, my old friend. Contrary to common belief, I am not omnipotent. I only see… potential futures. Paths that are open to those brave enough to make certain _choices_. Like the choice to leave exile and help an Empress recover her throne, with the right nudge in the right direction.”

Enigmatic little shit. “I doubt I made that much of an impact.”

“Perhaps. Perhaps not. But without your impact, would Emily have become as fascinating as she is today? Would she have ceased to exist at the age of ten, replaced in mind and soul? Or would she have remained the pampered little lady, naïve to the world?”

“Don’t try to cast my crimes in a positive light, you bastard.”

“But the outcome has been so fascinating.”

He’s beginning to despise that word. “So what’s going to happen?”

The Outsider is silent for the barest of moments. “Emily the Vengeful rules with an iron fist in Dunwall. With the death of Delilah Copperspoon, her coven lost its power and was smashed, their disastrous coup brought to an end.” He tilts his head. “Or Emily the Just rules for decades over a prosperous, mended empire with Corvo Attano by her side.”

“Which one is it? Emily the Vengeful or Emily the Just?”

“Both. Or neither. They are equally entrancing.” The Outsider gazes at him. “I’ll be keeping a close eye on the Empress for quite a while yet.”

“Yeah I bet you will,” Daud mutters.

“The consequences of your choices aren’t always immediately apparent, Daud.”

“My choices? Or choices of humans in general?”

“Yes.”

“The former or the latter?”

“Yes.”

“This is why I don’t like you, you know.”

“Oh, I know. And now there’s only one question left for you, Daud,” the Outsider says, and smirks. “What now?”

** **

“What now?” Billie Lurk asks.

He shrugs. “I go back to Cullero and wait to hear if I have a better employment offer,” he says. “I still have my vineyard to take care of in the meanwhile.”

She manages a small smile on the face that is now marred only by time and regret. “Long days in the sun?”

“Something like that. It was a good book. Gave me a lot to think about.”

“I can take you there, if you’d like.”

“Please.”

She nods and begins to leave, to prepare for departure. He catches her hand, a limb that hadn’t been there last week, a trauma she never had to go through in addition to everything else she has endured.

“Billie –”

Her breath catches in her throat at the sound of her name.

“You can stay with me,” Daud finally says, voice hoarse, to the person who was, who _is_ , the closest thing he’s ever had to a family. “If you’d like.”

When she meets his eyes, he sees his own tears reflected there, and she grasps his hand back. “Please,” she whispers.

It’s not happiness, he doesn’t think, not yet, but it’s something close to it.

He’s ready for what comes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And that's a wrap! Wow. I didn't think this would stretch beyond the first chapter, but I'm glad it did. A massive thank-you to everyone who's been reading and enjoying the story, and an especially big thanks to those of you who took the time to comment. <3

**Author's Note:**

> Just a... slight AU. I loved _Dishonored 2_ almost as much as the first game (THOSE LEVEL DESIGNS, HOLY HELL). But I found it... just a touch lacking in some of the areas that made the first game truly amazing. ~~*cough* Daud *cough*~~
> 
> This started off as a standalone piece that I didn't expect I'd have time to write more for, but what can I say? The inspiration bug bit me big time. Please enjoy!

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Whispers of Immortality](https://archiveofourown.org/works/11255961) by [ashestodusters](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ashestodusters/pseuds/ashestodusters)




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